In the film, you present
Tim as having a wide array of intellectual curiosities in his life. What about
this one in particular made you think this needed to be a movie?

Well, you know, I wasn’t ever looking to work with Tim. I wasn’t
ever looking to make a movie. My agenda, in this past five years, making a
documentary did not even cross my mind. Most people who make documentaries are
sniffing around for a documentary to make. I wasn’t one of those guys, you
know. I made The Aristocrats. I made a few movies, but I’m not looking. As a matter
of fact, it was a real accident. I mean, I had two young children. I still have
two young children. They were younger then. That’s the way things work.

I’ve heard that.

About five years ago, I realized that I had not
talked to anyone outside of my family that I wasn’t being paid to talk to in months.
It was really true. I hadn’t had one conversation, not even with a Starbucks
person. Every conversation I was paid for or was with my family, and so I
called Tim. When he tells the story--which I’ve heard him tell--he says it was a desperate phone call. It didn’t feel that way for me, but
maybe it sounded that way. I just said, “Listen, Tim, baby, I haven’t talked to
anybody in months. Come talk to me. Come have supper.” So, he jumped in his
plane in Texas and he flew to Vegas.

Like he does.

Like it was an emergency intervention! And we went out, because
it’s Vegas, for a big old hairy steak. And we’re sitting there having a steak
and I said to Tim, “Listen man, talk to me about something that has nothing to
do with work and I can’t possibly be working. I don’t want to have any
meetings, no interviews. Talk to me about something that’s totally outside of
the business.” And Tim said, “Ok, what do you know about Vermeer?” And I said,
you know, first page of Wikipedia, and he said, "Well," and he reaches on his hip,
which he always has, pulls out a video camera and shows me what we call the father-in-law footage of him painting the father-in-law.

Oh, so he already had
that?

The father-in-law picture. The one that you see in the movie is him
painting another one, talking to me about it, but he’d already painted the father-in-law. And he said to me... You know, the whole story of this movie is
never said in any interviews or in the movie, which is his youngest daughter
went to college. That’s all that happened.

So, he just had all this
free time?

Yeah, exactly.

Empty nest sent him into
an intellectual quest around the world.

Just missing his daughter. That’s all it was, his youngest
daughter.

Is she the one in the
painting?

Yeah.

That’s perfect.

So Tim said I’m going to build the room and I think I know
how Vermeer painted this. I’m going to build it all myself. I’m going to paint
this Vermeer in my warehouse. I said, “Well Tim, you failed miserably. This
does have something to do with my job. We’re going to stop everything and we’re
going to make this into a movie.” And Tim said, “I thought it’d be a one paper
in an art magazine and maybe a 5 minute youtube clip.” I said, “I think it’s
cooler than this. I really do man,” and then I tried to get out of it. I tried
to not make this movie, really hard. I took Tim all around LA and all around
NY, you can guess all of the TV stations you’d go to Discovery, National
Geographic, the whole (circuit).

Teller was saying there
was a certain level of distrust because it’s you guys, there’s going to be some
sort of other thing going on.

Well Teller wasn’t involved then, but
everybody thought I was just bullshitting. I was just punking people or
something. Then we got to here, I had misremembered this and then Glenn, our
manager, told me that we were very close to a deal. Somebody said they’d give
us money and you know what they would have done, (takes on a deep, serious tone) "dinosaur voice." And we went
out right here in midtown and went out with Tim for a lunch break and I said to
him, “Fuck it. let’s just makes it. Why are we dealing with other people. Let’s
just make it.” There would have been all sorts of constraints. It would have
been a much lower budget, maybe thankfully. And then we spent a while deciding
who was going to direct it. I mean, I guess you’d think Teller was the first
choice. He wasn’t the second choice, but we didn’t really think whether
he’d be right or not. And finally we’re like, let’s talk to Teller and Teller
completely got it and understood it and at that moment when Teller comes on,
it goes from, the idea, the one sentence of the movie, you know, a guy paints a
Vermeer in his warehouse in Texas, that was going to be anyone’s movie, but all
of the other stuff. All that kind of beautiful texture and everything that goes
around it, that’s all Teller. So, there was never a moment when I said you
know, let’s make a documentary. It was all just talk to me about something
else, oh I guess this should be a movie. Oh, I guess I’m going to have to make
the movie. Oh, I guess I’m going to have to really be involved in the movie.

So it actually kind of
follows his journey, where he’s like, I’m going to make this room. Oh, I
actually have to build all these things for myself. They don’t exist.

Yeah, and I also, one of the things I’m most proud of in the
whole movie is that it’s a happy movie. You know, most documentaries are real
drag city, and they’re supposed to be. It’s important stuff and it’s a good way
of communicating with people. You need all the atrocity documentaries, but
this is a documentary that’s just, the reaction we get from people is they feel
really excited and happy and inspired to do stuff, which is pretty great. It’s
pretty great to have something like that.

I completely admit, I
cried when you do the final reveal.

The other thing, that I don’t think many people are talking
about, but fascinates me, is it’s about 17th century technology, but it’s also
about 21st century technology. This movie is impossible 15 years ago. 15 years
ago, this movie is more expensive than Days
of Heaven or Apocalypse Now. We
had 9 cameras working on Tim while he was working. Every brush stroke is
covered by at least 3 cameras. There are 10 2-terabyte drives full of
information on this. It is more technologically amazing than Avatar.

As a video editor, that
gives me heart palpitations.

Patrick, who edited it, the amount of footage he went through.
So, you’re able to do this really crazy thing. You think of every brush stroke
from three angles and most from nine, when you weren’t picking what moment he
was painting. We really get to pick that and those dissolves. If this were made
15 years ago, you would have shot him for 15 minutes and then 2 weeks later,
would have shot him for another 15 minutes, with the cameras all set up, but
for most of that, when Tim is crying at the camera, at the picture, he’s the
only one in the room. You see him setting u the cameras to begin with and he
set up three cameras. We have a three camera shoot and the only person there is
the talent. It’s a crazy situation. It’s also an odd documentary, in that it
really is a document, going in real time. Yes, he painted the father-in-law picture first, but then I stopped everything. So, when you see then meeting
with Hockney. It’s the first meeting with Hockney. First meeting was Steadman.
It’s every drop of paint is being put on in real time, so it’s you know, Super Size Me, and those kinds of
movies, turn out to be fake. He was lying about those, but this really is, not
really a stunt, but it really is a document, which I think there will be a lot
more movies like this and this may be seen as the first one. I can’t think of
another movie it takes reality show technology and does something beautiful
with it.

That’s a really good way
of putting it. I like that. In Vanity Fair, you describe this as "a very
American kind of plot line." How is that?

Well, you know. Teller was the one who was really obsessed with
this being American. It’s completely unrooted in tradition. It’s just a guy
who, I mean, albeit really smart, with a huge amount of gumption and a little
bit, just a little bit of Tony Stark going on there. He’s a little bit like
Iron Man flying his own helicopter and sports car and all of that. I want to go
to Buckingham Palace and see this, you know. There’s a little bit of that, but
it’s this sense that, you just don’t see a culture that’s rooted in tradition
as having someone say essentially, “Fuck it, I’ll paint a Vermeer.” That’s a
pretty American point of view.

Sure, but Tim’s assertion
lacks hubris, like it doesn’t...

Isn’t that weird?

Yeah.

Isn’t it weird that he’s humble that when you say the sentence,
you think about a big swinging dick doing it, and yet he does it with this
great humility and gentleness. It’s a nutty combination. It has this pure
individualism but without any malice…People get
really bristling about you know, Tim’s going to be insulting Vermeer or taking
him down or something. And they see the movie and there’s not one moment when he
does not say a syllable against Vermeer. Every single thing he says
about Vermeer is absolute awe and reverence and yet he wants to follow in the
footsteps and doesn’t even, you know, after he climbs the mountain, he doesn’t
even say, I conquered the mountain. He just kind of says, "Well, here I am. Good
night."

You’re kind of re-angling
the argument on what makes Vermeer an artistic genius.

Yeah, you know, I keep comparing it to the first time I heard
Beatle bootlegs. The first time I heard that the Beatles worked on stuff, you
know. When I was a child, I think every child, whatever music is coming out
then, you think that somehow it just, the artist thought of it, then did it. You
don’t think about the hours of creation that go into that. And to me, when you
say, and I don’t mean to quote myself directly in the movie, but when you just
say, "here’s a genius we don’t understand," all you’re saying is magic. You’re
saying, "Oh there’s magic." How did Vermeer paint those paintings? Magic. And if
you take magic away, you actually add to the human wonder and the glory. All
three of us, are very strong atheists. In a certain sense, this is such a deep
atheist movie in that it loves people. You know, you’ll see some fans of Vermeer
that want to say he was one of a kind that could do this stuff that we could
never understand.

There’s something divine
about it.

And to go, “No, he really worked his ass off and he was really
talented and smart,” and that to me, fills me with so much more joy than magic,
poof, you know, and there are some people who still claim that Vermeer didn’t
even have a room, but just walked up to a canvas and did that.

After watching the movie,
that’s mind blowing to me. But the film was on the short list for
best documentary, the Academy short list. What did that teach you guys about
the awards circuit, as it is?

I don’t know anything about it. I still don’t. We didn’t. As I
said, I am a filmmaker by definition, because I’ve made films but I’m not a
filmmaker by culture, so I think that the idea that it would be, that it would
be considered in any way for an academy award, was never said by any of the
three of us. It was said by Sony way down the line, when it was finished. I
think that anyone else who was on the short list, somebody working on the
movie, probably said earlier, wouldn’t it be cool if we won an Academy Award.
Our movie, it was never mentioned. When Sony first said that we’re going to try
to see if we can get this considered for an award, we all kind of went, really?
You know, we were so interested in, we were so interested in making a movie
about art. We weren’t thinking much about making an art movie.

Did you at all think the
discussion of art and science and the way you kind of reframed that discussion
been part of why it didn’t make the top five, that that threatened somebody?

I have no idea. We’re just so not part of that scene. Tim is
Texas, we’re Vegas, and those two places are not represented very much in the
filmmaking culture. You know, as I said, there’s no, there’s no bitterness and
there’s no wonder, because it never crossed our mind. I don’t even know
what they’re looking for and I don’t know what they’re trying to say, and I
don’t think it’s... There’s another possibility, that’s very very clear and real
that there were five better movies than ours. You can talk about threatening
and this and that, but there’s also that possibility. I don’t want to
misrepresent myself. I get all of the screeners. I have some sort of vote. I’m
a member of the Writer’s Guild and all that stuff, so I really do know more
than a lay person, but it’s kind of outside of my sphere. Ultimately, I do a
magic show in Vegas.

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Kristy Puchko is a critic/entertainment journalist who has been published on Vanity Fair, Vulture, Time Out NY, Nerdist, Pajiba, IndieWire, Mental Floss, Screen Rant, Screen Crush, Film.com, The Mary Sue, The Film Stage and CBR.com. She also co-hosts the weekly movie review podcast Popcorn & Prosecco (now on iTunes!), and regularly joins the cast of It's Erik Nagel, on Sirius XM.